Silicon Alleys

In 2005, the editors of Metro Silicon Valley, San Jose’s alternative weekly newspaper, offered Gary Singh his own column, “Silicon Alleys,” to explore the underbelly of San Jose and Silicon Valley from a bent perspective that only a native wacko could offer. Fifteen years later, Gary still writes the column every week. Now for the first time, a selection of Gary’s greatest hits — over 250 Silicon Alleys columns in chronological order — is available in one mammoth volume, personally hand-picked by the columnist. Following a gnarly foreword by cyberpunk science fiction pioneer Rudy Rucker, a glorious mishmash of humanity emerges. UFO researchers sit right alongside politicians, rock stars, repo men and professional wrestlers. Buddhist heroes hold column space with women’s drinking clubs. Abandoned shopping malls and crumbling trailer parks come alive on the pages. From punk rock to high art, from dive bars to luxury digs, from literary fixations to forgotten local history, plus abstract mystical screeds and sometimes even journalism, no other body of work more aptly sorts out the guts of San Jose — “America’s 10th largest city” — than Gary’s weekly column. In his introduction, Gary writes: “Over the years, I came to understand the city of San Jose as a character in one long story told via Metro columns each week.” As a result, readers will join Gary in discovering a diverse interconnected matrix of perspectives on that city, his home town, as he has come to know it, warts and all.